Digital farming gets a major upgrade

What the Bayer / Microsoft partnership means for your farm and our planet.

Farming has come a long way over the past century. From horse-drawn plows to the first tractors, to digital agricultural productivity tools like Climate FieldView^TM, the history of modern farming is one of innovation and invention. Naturally, this innovation has been geared toward improving yields, maximizing profits and putting food on tables. Now, we’ve got another chapter to add to the story—Bayer’s recent partnership with global tech giant, Microsoft.

Announced this past November, this ground-breaking partnership will combine the agronomic knowhow of Bayer, with the computing capabilities of Azure, Microsoft’s suite of cloud-based digital tools and data science solutions. The goal? To accelerate farming innovation and optimize all the ways we convert natural resources into food, feed, fuel and fiber.

A global step toward sustainability

By collecting and storing farming information in the cloud, farmers and agronomists around the planet will have access to farm and climate data that can be used to make better decisions at the field level. Considering global figures for population growth and climate change, this foray into sustainable agricultural production is an incredibly important one for farmers, humanity in general, and the planet we all live on.

Impact on Climate FieldView farmers

Now that we’ve taken a snapshot from the 30,000-foot viewpoint, what does this partnership look like on the ground for farmers already using the Climate FieldView platform?

We’re pleased to say that for those of you using FieldView to streamline operations, there will be no noticeable impact to your user experience—you’ll continue to use the tools as per usual. Rather, updates to the system will occur more on the back end of things, to help deliver long-term product stability to the FieldView applications you’ve come to rely on.

Essentially, by partnering with Microsoft and gaining access to their cloud-based digital tools and team, Bayer, along with our own FieldView team, can focus on new capabilities being requested by farmers like you.

Your privacy is secure

Another aspect of your relationship with FieldView that won’t change is our privacy policy. As always, Bayer does not, and will not share customer farm data with third parties, without your consent. If you want to keep your field data private, that’s your prerogative. What’s cool however, is the data you collect may help you gain more valuable insights from your own fields, and in doing so, put more food on more tables.

Make no mistake, farming has come a long, long way. Still, as we look to the future, we know that there’s still much further to go—acres of opportunities to work smarter and promote a sustainable industry for all. Now, thanks to this exciting new partnership, it can all happen even faster.